Every Monday I let you take a peek at what I'm reading. Here's another installment of What to Read this Week.

This week I'm loving me some free stuff and I'm sharing some great articles on increasing your site traffic, using video and some reasons to rethink ads.

Free Stock Photos

Okay, so you really don't read stock photos, but I thought I would share with you some freebies that were offered this past week. Hubspot is giving away 750 free stock photos that are perfect for blog posts and websites. All you need to do is fill out their form.

Why yes, that is one of the free stock photos, above.

Buffer also rolled out a free way to create stock photos with inspirational quotes or copy in just seconds with their tool Pablo. I've given it a try and it's really easy to use. You choose an image, type out your text and share or download the image.

Increase Your Site Traffic with Backlinks

Good traffic flow can get your site noticed, so I rounded up a couple of great articles by Neil Patel on boosting traffic using backlinks.

Can You Grow Your Organic Traffic Without Generating Content? Neil says yes, but you need backlinks. This article gives website owners some great insight and tips.

[bctt tweet="So, what’s the secret to ranking high if you don’t want to focus on content generation? It’s backlinks. -Neil Patel" via="no"]

Of course, after reading that, you'll need a few tips on backlinking. 7 Proactive Ways to Get Backlinks That’ll Actually Boost Your Traffic doesn't give you tips on old hat linking. Neil offers up-to-date ideas for getting backlinks without ticking off Google.

Jump Into Video

Curious about how video can positively affect your site? Check out Let's Get Visual: 7 Reasons to Add Video to Your Marketing Mix.  According to the article, 100 million users watch online videos daily. You can be one of the businesses offering those voracious watchers great video content.

Ads Are Silly

Jon Morrow always has the best article titles on his site and this one isn't any different. 13 Reasons Why Blog Ads Are a Silly Monetization Strategy (And What to Do Instead)by Sarah Peterson is great. She points out in this little gem that unless you have tons of traffic, you'll never make much money with ads. So what should you do instead? Read the article!

Once you're done with Jon's article, read 5 Advanced Techniques I Use To Make Money On My Blog by Erin Bender. This article is aimed at bloggers looking to make more money from their blog in unusual ways. It's one of the most creative posts I've read on the subject in a long time.

What are you reading this week? Anything good? Let me know! Oh, and feel free to share a link to anything good you've written this week.